Watching CAPITU AND THE CHAPTER feels like seeing a person from the 19th century photographed in HD: the film is full of anachronistic details. Júlio Bressane adapts the Brazilian tale of tales on passion, jealousy and paranoia, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’ Don Casmurro. He also taps its legacy, navigating the distance between novelas and tele-novelas, between literary classics and the huge production scales of contemporary soap-operas. Where does cinema stand in this dispute? Nowhere and everywhere, as cinema has its own ways: Bressane constructs a precise, austere film around actual soap opera stars (and funding) using a minimal set, with a house to gather inside and a few painted walls to stand in front of, a series of precious objects and deforming mirrors, and haunting, repurposed images from his previous films.
(Woche der Kritik)